mercury@ut-ngp.UUCP (Larry E. Baker) (11/25/85)
[frustration is the mother of invention]
You will note that this is a sketchey "review," at best. This is due mainly
to the fact that I have only made a superficial examination of this
product, but felt that my initial observations might be of use to the net
populance.
NOTE: I have no connectons with MIX Software, save as a satisfied
customer.
NAME: The Mix editor
DESCRIPTION: Full screen, multi-machine text editor.
PRICE: $29.95 (actually $36.?? after shipping, etc.)
COMPANY: MIX Software
2116 E. Arapaho, Suite 363
Richardson, TX 75081
Order line: (800) 523-9520 (Visa, MC)
Inquiries: (214) 783-6001
CLAIMS: Autoindent, automatic line numbering, fill and justify ala
Wordstar but with straight ASCII, split screen with multi-
file editing, alterable command-key mappings (initially
like Wordstar) with macro-key assignments and a DOS shell
escape as well as other features.
OVERALL: I think it's great, for the price. Seems to do just about
everything that the documentation claims, though there are
a few minor bugs. And there's a *lot* to it for $29.95.
OVERVIEW: The MIX editor falls into the category of Emacs/Wordstar
editors; that is, a single keystroke (usually a control key
or alt-key) corresponding to some editor function, such as
moving down a line, deleting a line, etc. It is somewhat
more like Emacs in that there are a large collection of
"functions" that are available for mapping to any key,
though they are available from a "command mode" as well.
Macros are supported, and are constructed out of a kind of
abbreviated command language.
COMMENTS: The editor seems pretty nice, given its cost. I have
not had a chance to examine or test it completely, mainly
due to problems with our TI PCs: currently, the editor
must use the subset of the ANSI screen driver present in
the BIOS, which is so awful that the editor is reduced to
re-drawing the screen whenever you want to scroll the screen
down a line. As soon as I can get my hands on a TI TRM,
I'll patch it to use the video interrupt (it comes with
some crude instructions on how to do this) which will make
it *much* friendlier. With a good ANSI driver, or
something that supported things like "insert a line," it
would be even faster. On a reasonably intelligent ASCII
terminal, it would really fly.
The documentation is rather complete, in a softback, bound
8.5x11 booklet. It is nicely prepared, photoreprodced from
letter-quality printer outut. It is terse, and obviously
designed for the experienced programmer.
This is possibly the most portable editor I have seen,
right up there with the TURBO Pascal editor. It is
completely configurable for nearly any display device:
any ASCII terminal that supports direct-cursor
addressing, and just about any MS-DOS personal computer
that has a BIOS video interrupt to locate the cursor.
It is able to take advantage of more "advanced" features of
a terminal/screen driver, like "erase to end of line,"
"insert line," "delete line," etc. though it can make do
with nothing but direct cursor addressing, or even
vertical/horizontal cursor movement.
Detailed instructions are provided for installing the
editor, and ours was up within about 15 minutes of opening
the box. Instructions are provided for patching
the editor for using the video interrupt to address a PC's
cursor directly (it comes set up for the IBM PC),
though I have not yet done this due to a lack of TI
technical documentation.
This editor can be easily adapted to look almost exactly
like many other editors, excepting editors that have "modes,"
like VI. This is convienent, as one can standardise
key-mappings across machines (say, to look like Emacs)
removing the need to know 50 sets of editor key
assignments. You can also have different start-up files,
thus having a seperate set for Pascal, C, etc. with
appropriate macros.
COMPLAINTS: The manual could be more complete, though it is pretty
complete as it is. It is somewhat terse when it comes
to patching the editor to use a different BIOS interrupt
to control the cursor.
They could have used a more verbose command language.
Commands consist of two-letter abbreviations, which (to me)
is inconvienent as it is virtually unreadable to the
inexperienced eye. The command set is very extensive,
though, which sort of makes up for it, and some commands
have long forms (RS == REPLACE string) which helps.
The .EXE file is rather large, ~50K, so if you plan to use
the DOS escape function (which I have not tried) you should
probably have a lot of memory handy. Considering the size
of some of Microsoft's compilers, I'd think that 512K would
be just about right.
BUGS: The only bug I have detected to date is that some of the
macros provided with the editor do not seem to work as
documented. I cannot tell (yet) whether or not I am using
them incorrectly, or if they are not acting the way they
are supposed to (I suspect the former).
I welcome comments and constructive mail, and am willing to post or mail
more detailed observations and descriptions to those who want them.
Larry jlh@loral.UUCP (Desperatly seeking happiness) (11/27/85)
In article <2646@ut-ngp.UUCP>, mercury@ut-ngp.UUCP (Larry E. Baker) writes: > [frustration is the mother of invention] > due to problems with our TI PCs: currently, the editor > must use the subset of the ANSI screen driver present in > the BIOS, which is so awful that the editor is reduced to > re-drawing the screen whenever you want to scroll the screen > down a line. As soon as I can get my hands on a TI TRM, I know of a few people with this editor and it's not the BIOS redrawing the screen, it's the editor. Another symptom of this is that if they want to find, say, the fourth occurance of the word 'frobozz' the editor stops and redraws the screen on the three frobozzes in between. This is the only negative thing I've heard them say about the thing. disclaimer: I've never used the editor, just seen it used. I also have no relation to MIX, Infocom, or my father (sorry dad).
mercury@ut-dillo.UUCP (Larry E. Baker) (12/01/85)
> > due to problems with our TI PCs: currently, the editor > > must use the subset of the ANSI screen driver present in > > the BIOS, which is so awful that the *editor* is reduced to > > re-drawing the screen whenever you want to scroll the screen > > down a line. As soon as I can get my hands on a TI TRM, > > I know of a few people with this editor and it's not the BIOS redrawing the > screen, it's the editor. Another symptom of this is that if they want to > find, say, the fourth occurance of the word 'frobozz' the editor stops and > redraws the screen on the three frobozzes in between. This is the only > negative thing I've heard them say about the thing. Uh, I said "*editor*," but you have a point. I don't know if the silly thing will *continue* to re-draw the screen, even after I make the BIOS patch. If it does, I think that would be a major point against it. I hope it has the intelligence to use a more advanced screen driver, with, say, "insert-line" escape codes. If I can ever get reasonable TI documentation, and can fish out the articles I remember seeing in PC Tech Journal on writing serial device drivers, I'll make an attempt to write something a little more potent than the awful ANSI support that TI provides in the BIOS. Which will, BTW, be posted on the net if anyone's interested. Also, there was one thing that I think I forgot to emphasize in my "review:" the MIX editor has a "paging" feature that allows it to edit larger-than- editor-memory files. But you can only page *forward*. I have not encountered this myself (yet), but I can see it as an irritant. In this month's Dr. Dobbs there is a short review of the editor, and the author claims that the edit buffer is about 15k, which is kind of small if you have a machine with 512k installed. With a hard disk I don't think the paging would be much more than a minor irritant since, being a strong beliver in modularity, I keep most of my source files < 15k. But with the (abismally slow) floppy disk drives on our TI's, this might be a problem. -- Larry Baker mercury@ut-ngp.{ARPA, UUCP, UTEXAS.EDU} University of Texas at Austin ut-sally!ut-ngp!mercury@csnet-relay.CSNET Computer Science/Physics phgl774@uta3081.BITNET